Reflections on maintaining Angband this last year

External Since: Jan 18, 2008 Posts: 37

pete m wrote:
> On Jan 25, 3:28 pm, Andrew Sidwell <takka... DeleteThis @gmail.com> wrote:
>> fully GPL/Angband-licenced. Because the game now has good, usable (and
>> Free) SDL and GTK ports, I plan on removing the Xaw and X11 ports. I
>> also plan on packaging the SDL port as the default for Windows systems.
>> [3] Slightly controversial, but I think necessary for maintenance.
>> [3] There are other good reasons for avoiding the native Windows port.
>> It has lots of bugs and no-one knows the code well enough to fix them.
>> Even if they did, the code is not Free.
>
>
> Bummer about the Windows and X11 ports not being GPL.
> NOTE: they are certainly 'free', and the windows port in particular
> does not require GPL.

I did say "Free", as in the OSI definition of "Free".

> I for one am no fan of the SDL port. SDL is a royal pain to install
> for the casual developer; it depends on a firehose of a software
> database. The first time I messed around with GTK, I felt the same
> way about it as well, though to a lesser extent. Again, for a bare-
> bones installation, it is much more overhead than just X11.

Most people on Linux, however, will already have, or will find it easy
to get, SDL and GTK. The main issue here is that no-one maintains or
wants to maintain a bare X11 port, and with good reason.

--
Andrew Sidwell
http://rephial.org/

External Since: Jan 18, 2008 Posts: 37

Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd wrote:
> On 2008-01-27 02:06:48, konijn_ <konijn.RemoveThis@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 2008-01-26 20:00:07, Eddie Grove wrote:
>
>>>> /* Copy j_ptr into o_ptr*/
>>>> object_copy(o_ptr, j_ptr);
>>> That's completely pointless.
>> Bzzz. No it is not, there is no reason, especially in Angband code, that o_ptr
>> would not be copied into j_ptr. Yes, you might now this, I actually know this as
>> a part-time maintainer, but it is not pointless.
>
> What is pointless, is the object_copy function itself. (Unfortunately, when I
> eradicated that function from Zaiband I missed the fact that z-virt.h's COPY is
> itself mostly pointless when not type-punning.)

It's pointless now, but it might not be in future, plausibly. So I
think keeping it is better than not.

--
Andrew Sidwell
http://rephial.org/